6/4/13

Ok, when I left off yesterday I'd just shot up a couple targets with the SKS and was very pleased with the results.  As I was leaving the range, I called mom to see if a) she was home and 2) had she eaten lunch yet.  She was and she hadn’t.  I said I was on the opposite side of town and would be home in fifteen to twenty minutes.  When I pulled up, she was sitting in her car in the garage waiting for me.  I hopped in the driver’s seat and we went to West Side Café for lunch.  I had a nice Club Sandwich and fries, she had grilled Skunkfish… or Tilapia as the marketing folks are calling it now.  After lunch I settled in to wait for time to go to the JNC car thing at Freebird’s.  When the time came, I checked the website to see if anyone else was coming because I really didn’t want to go.  A few guys said they’d be there so I put on my ballet slippers and headed to the garage.  I arrived first and got out to wait for the others.  At about 1845 h I said to myself, “If no one is here at 1900 h, I'm leaving.”  Jeff pulled up within a few minutes.  We hung out until Tim from Lewisville arrived on his 125cc Honda motorcycle.  We grokked it for a bit, and then had a look at Jeff’s truck.  Another guy showed up in a 240SX so we looked at that.  The Seven was scrutinized and then we went in to eat.  Jeff and I each had brownies and sodas while Tim had a burrito.  Eventually we went back out and “Crash” showed up with his Corolla and little daughter.  She immediately ran to the “Hello Kitty Car” and looked it over.  She loves The Seven, as most kids do.  We hung out chatting for a while and then I had a rumbling in my belly.  A bombing mission would be needed soon.  Then I became aware that my butt-crack felt… funny.  I thought back to the rumble and wondered if I'd shat myself when attempting a fart.  Rather than risk it, I took my leave of the guys and hopped in the car to go home.  No one said anything about me having “mud-butt” but I still wasn’t sure.  I hauled ass home and parked the car then ran to release a hostage.  I had not shart myself after all, it was just a sweaty ass-crack which I had become self-consciously aware of and panicked.  So, there you have the rest of the story.  I guess I could have told it yesterday after all since it didn’t take nearly as long as I'd thought it might.  Oh well, what are you going to do?  So, I think I'm going to renege on selling George to either of the dudes who have shown interest.  John made the point that if I make the Chickenhawk into a jacked-up faux rally car, I won't have a low-slung road racer 1200 anymore.  There’s also the fact that I have it, it has a title in my name, and I only paid $5.00 for it originally… and we will have more room at this new place than I was afeared we might.  Oh, and I haven’t heard anything from either of them in a couple weeks.  So, I need to go put George back on the DLR inventory elsewhere in this laptop.  I'm thinking, right now, that I'll put a freshened and warmed over A-14 in there with that single side-draft carburetor and a five-speed.  And by “freshened and warmed over” I mean I'm going to re-rebuild that turbo engine with an A-14 block, crank, rods, and STOCK cam.  I'll use the ceramic-coated pistons and head from the turbo build though.  I'll probably even use the ceramic-coated cast iron manifold since it is a true four-port jobbie, unlike the three-port thing on The Seven.  Why not put the four-port manifold on The Seven?  Well, I'll tell you.  First off, the head on The Seven has had the wall between the two and three exhaust ports “knife edged” to flow into the three-port manifold.  I've also welded on a band-clamp ring to the three-port manifold to mate it to The Seven's zorst.  And then there’s the fact that I don’t want to take The Seven off the road even for the short length of time it would take to make the swap.  Ok, now we come to the portion of the program where I give John some shit.  I don’t think I'll even consider putting the Z-20 in George because the header I built, specifically for a Z-20 in a 1200, went away with the 510 wagon John sold a few weeks ago.  [ Says who? - SM ]  Ok, so the real reason is I don’t want to explode the tiny 4.11 rear end in George with the torque of a two-liter… but I couldn’t pass up gouging John about the header.  Oh well, no use spilling milk under the bridge, I suppose.  No worries.  Ok, one last thought and then I'm going to lunch.  The track-pad thingy on my Dingleberry is acting up.  Every time I touch it to try and scroll through a menu or something, it goes crazy and shoots the cursor, or whatever, up continuously.  The thing has almost been throw across the room several times in the last few days.  I think it is time for me to down-grade back to a dumb-phone.  The only things I am going to ask for are that it make phone calls and have a QWERTY keyboard for text messages.  If I have to get a “smart” phone to get a keyboard, I'm… well, I don’t know what.  I suppose I could go totally cave-man and do without the QWERTY keyboard.  Anyone texting me would get binary replies back: 1=yes, 0=no, and don’t ask anything which will require more than that unless you want a call-back answer.  Of course the reason I haven’t gone dumb-phone already is because I'm still stuck paying for data because John and Samantha have those fucking i-Phone things.  He’s trying to get me to go back to another one of those bastards.  “i-Phones are $1.00,” he says.  “They’d have to pay me more than THAT!” I reply.  I fucking hate i-Phones.  No, I want a regular old dumb-phone.   [ I think the problem is that they don't make those any more... - SM ]  I may take a run to the AT&T store after a while to see what I can do.